Scene on the Road

Saturday's Daily Photo was originally this one of a yellow VW bug that I saw in the Rite Aid parking lot. When I took a second look after sleeping on it, I didn't think it worked. So I swapped it out early this morning for the photo above that I also shot yesterday. I have been keeping an eye on the Cherry Hill water tower as they prepare for maintenance and repainting, and originally planned on using it for a future posting.

Photographer Rosemary Mackintosh - a contributor from last summer's Road Trips blog - reminded me that the tower - and gas station - is the very same "Petit's Mobil Station, Cherry Hill, New Jersey" captured by New Jersey fine-art photographer George Tice. It's the cover of his book, Urban Landscapes: A New Jersey Portrait.

(Click here and then scroll down about halfway to see Rosemary's photo, also from New Jersey, of her sons on the early morning beach at Ocean City).

When I first realized I was moving to the state almost twenty years ago, the Tice photo happened to be one of the images I had in my mind. But for some reason, I always associated the picture with the industrial, stereotypical non-garden part of New Jersey. Who knows, I probably even thought the tower was a fuel storage tank.

That water tower is such a prominent landmark, right between I-295 and the NJ Turnpike, that it's easy to spot from the air. I always use it to get my bearings while looking out the window, approaching a landing at Philadelphia International Airport.

I hadn't thought about it much until Rosemary commented that my Day Sixty One Daily Photo of the gas pumps at Wawa reminded her of his photo. I remember a few years ago when I pulled into the 7-11 adjacent to the Tice gas station and water tower and realized where I was. I looked up, and there it was, like some larger-than-life 3D image in an outdoor museum.

Speaking of museums, I'm sure many of you have made your own versions of famous photographs. I asked here before, but now I'm broadening my request beyond New Jersey sites. If you have a picture you've taken, either on a photo pilgrimage, or one of a famous photo scene you just happened to revisit, please email it to me as a jpeg attachment at roadtrip@phillynews.com

Over the years Tice's is not the only well-known photo-scene I've stumbled upon. Maybe, like me, you were walking along the sidewalk and stared right at the very same Flatiron Building Edward J. Steichen (and Alfred Stieglitz and many, many others...) photographed in New York. Send them along, and I'll post some in the coming weeks.

Back to George Tice's photo. I graduated from high school in Las Vegas the same year, 1974, he took the photo. One of my friends even had a Dodge Charger like the one in the photo. Just a couple reasons the image always stuck with me. Since moving here, I heard from someone (I can't recall who, when or where) that the car in the photo belonged to a wrestler at Cherry Hill East HS, which is still just a few pennies worth of gas away on the same Kresson Road - even with the average price of gasoline almost doubling that year, climbing from 37.9 cents a gallon to 55.1 cents (the Oil Crisis).

And finally, the Tice photo was also an album cover. That's jazz guitarist Bill Frisell's 2001 CD, Blues Dream. Click on the image to hear a sample.